Salvage Probes and Salvage Sites have been suggested before, however this seems to be the way forward for them so I am for them, so on that side of things +1
I also like the idea of a Salvage Frigate (also +1)
I also like the Idea of A Derelict ship which you can send troops too, however instead of NPC’s I suggest we just wait for warclones to be implemented. so this is also a +1
if Salvaging was squirreled into the category of Exploration, you could theoretically create a PVE Salvage Site.
this can be done two ways
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simply just create the site and have it detectable by D-scan / Normal probes but have ship restrictions for the anomaly in space, perhaps you find a acceleration gate and slap the ship restrictions on there just like missions and ESS
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you create salvage probes + salvage probe launcher and only allow it to be fit onto salvage ships (i hope this also includes a salvage frigate) you can then balance the ships dealing with salvage accordingly allowing bonuses to scan probes and such things, I would still feel though having salvage sites would have to be ship restricted as there would be nothing stopping people from scanning the site in a salvage ship, book marking it, then changing ship and swooping in.
you basically have a red herring site.
find site, warp in, find some kind of hackable which doesn’t give you much. maybe just a shiny bauble
beginning the hack allows for ships to spawn.
two options
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waves of ships just come after you, these would have to be little to no bounty on them, you hack the can while your drones pew and create wrecks, then when you succeed or fail the salvaging you clean up the site.
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seeing as this already happens in game randomly between some NPCs, you could simply have two NPC groups show up and blow each other out of the sky because they’re fighting over [insert shiny bauble here] once the fight is over depending on your faction standings a bunch of blues floating around you, or some rats to pick off if you’re red to both groups.
if the idea of a salvage frigate and other salvage ships is on the table, honestly i would propose a complete rework how salvaging ships work anyway.
I for one as a salvager would like to see some kind of fuel based assault damage control i could fit to my ship, this way even if battle ships are firing full salvo at me I can brush it off and keep salvaging.
like all ships, salvage ships should have a means to defend themselves, however this doesn’t always have to be increased weapon or drone damage & range, the Noctis is a big slow pain to move around which honestly needs a paint job or a much more shiny looking t2 version.
give it some kind of warp core strength bonus so its insanely hard to scram and keep on grid and maybe we won’t worry about the cost so much because even if we get caught, we can still slip away. this would honestly null the aspect of how slow the ship is anyway
Currently: “the noctis is slow, it gets blown up easy”
however we could have “the noctis is slow, but you basically can’t hold it even if you catch it” and/or
“the noctis is slow, but its only good for salvaging”
honestly one thing i think would be cool for salvaging would be an on board reprocessing capability.
slap a mineral hold onto the noctis and a fuel powered reprocessing module, this would allow people to use the “scrapmetal processing” skill while in space and usher any minerals they pump out into their mineral hold, on another suggestion I once threw out there many moons ago, I suggested having a refining yield for reprocessing over time.
even though people liked the idea, it wasn’t implemented, which i understand, HOWEVER why not slap very feature onto the idea of a noctis having onboard scrap metal reprocessing.
this would be a cool idea so if the game gave us salvagers LOTS of small almost isk worthless scrap metal to reprocess maybe even civilian grade stuff, we hit reprocess, give the module something like 75% reprocess before factoring in skills, give the cycles 5 minutes for the modules, however the longer the module runs, you get a further increased reprocessing yield.
so just as example, module + max skills = 80% for example
give +2% yield on the next cycle and have it accumulate.
this way we can fill up our ships full of junk stuff and have to sit there reprocessing it, in fact, it would be good to be able to have salvage drones out there salvaging wrecks while your ship is chewing threw the materials.
reasonable sized cargo hold with an appropriate mineral hold, similar to compression you need x amount of units or m3 in order to reprocess.
personally if the onboard over time processing was factored in, I would even go as far as to say I’m not even against the idea of having scrapmetal compression on a ship, allowing us to turn all those various random loot things we have into metal cubes, which are then used in the onboard reprocessing, the more cubes you have the better.
if that became a factor, you could even set up space based salvage and scrap yards which you raid for these “scrap cubes”
you can reprocess stuff normally in stations even the suggested scrap cubes for lower reprocessing yield, but if you do it over time in space in a noctis, you’ll get a good yield.